Changes to EUID Password Standards

The UNT Computing and
Information Technology Center has begun an effort to strengthen password security for the information systems used by
students,
faculty, and staff. The goal of this effort is to protect personal and
sensitive information that may be stored on UNT computing systems. As
a
first step, strong passwords will now be required for using your EUID
to
access systems including EIS, EagleMail, WebCT, my.unt.edu, and
Central
Web page editing.

A strong password is one that is not easily guessed by people or
computer
programs. For example, your name is not a strong password, since that
is
information known to many others. Likewise, words in a dictionary are
not
strong passwords, since computer programs will easily read that
dictionary
and try each word if it knows your login name. A strong password is a
less obvious sequence of characters which contains a variety of upper
and
lower case letters, numbers, and punctuation.

EUID Passwords may expire soon . . .

To ensure that strong passwords are in use, it may be necessary for
UNT to
set an immediate expiration date on your password before the end of
this
calendar year (2004). If we do so and you have not recently changed
your
password, you will then need to change it or reset it before you can
log
into central computing systems such as EIS, EagleMail, and my.unt.edu.

To change your EUID password, you can point any web browser at
http://ams.unt.edu/ and follow the
steps on that page. Detailed
instructions for changing or resetting your password can be found on
the
CITC helpdesk page (
http://www.unt.edu/helpdesk ). Once you set a new
password, it will be valid for 120 days.

When you change or reset your EUID password via the UNT Account
Management
Page ( http://ams.unt.edu/ ), your
new password will now have to contain
upper and lower case characters and either a number or punctuation
mark.
Your password will need to be something other than a recognizable word
or
name. If your password is not considered strong enough by the Account
Management program, you can ask it to suggest a strengthened password
for
you and it will provide you with a list of possible strong passwords
based
on what you previously entered.

Don't wait to change your password!

If you don't have a strong password set for your EUID, we suggest
that you
do so as soon as possible. This will prevent our manual expiration
process from disabling your account and allow you to reset your
password
in a deliberate manner so that you can have time to decide on a value
that
is most memorable to you. Note that this information applies only to
the
EUID password used for the systems mentioned above and not for Windows
workstation or Novell Network access.